


floodlights

by orphan_account



Category: SKAM (Norway)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Break Up, Established Relationship, F/M, Getting Back Together, M/M, Multi, POV Alternating, William and Noora Going Through It, repost from old account, set in the nebulous time period between s3 and s4
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-02-12 14:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21478219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: hi helloI wrote this during a Bad time in my life and now that I’m in a profoundly better state of mind, the piece looks different, and not in a bad way either.maybe I’ll even continue it.enjoy.
Relationships: Even Bech Næsheim/Isak Valtersen, William Magnusson/Noora Amalie Sætre
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hi hello  
I wrote this during a Bad time in my life and now that I’m in a profoundly better state of mind, the piece looks different, and not in a bad way either.  
maybe I’ll even continue it.  
enjoy.

“How did you meet Noora?”

It’s a momentous question, the first Linn’s asked since William’s helped himself to the left side of the sofa. She watches his forehead shrink in on itself, his eyes dilating as if the subject of their mutual admiration shares their space in front of him.

“I got involved with a friend of hers,” he says slowly, as if he’s methodically dictating the words of this story in his head. 

Linn wonders at the sheer amount of girls brave enough to involve themselves with him, this boy resplendent in his stupid expensive hoodie and lazily fashionable sweatpants.

“When this friend of hers confronted me,” William says, “I told her off. Then Noora fucked me up. I didn’t stop thinking about her until I finally fell asleep the next morning. Didn’t fucking help; I dreamt about her.”

Reaching for the remote on the cluttered living room table, Linn bites her bottom lip, smiling.

“What happened in your dream?”

His mouth stiffens and curls in an offhand way that dips Linn’s stomach.

“If I said what we did, she’d serve you my head.”

From the kitchen, an indulgent snort startles them out of their sultry stupor.

“What the fuck, Eskild,” William says, rolling his eyes. “Listening the whole time. Don’t lie to me, asshole.”

In response, the third resident of the flat whistles through his teeth, mimicking the tea wailing on the electric kettle.

“God, I could not forsake my privacy if I tried.”

Flattening the sprawl of his bangs obscuring his eyes, William stretches himself across the expanse of the sofa, tucking his legs into his chest so as not to knock Linn off of the surface. She can’t help but flinch at the firm muscles of his ass, the wicked hint of a powerful chest threatening to barrel through his shirt. Noora wouldn’t go for someone as outwardly terrifying as him without a damn good reason.

Then again, maybe she’s assuming a deeper knowledge of Noora’s taste than the case in reality.

“What do you think Noora sees in you?”

Thankfully the question comes out with less judgment than she feared it might. Drawing himself up, William lounges his arm across the blanketed back of the sofa.

“Mostly an asshole, but more importantly, an actual person.”

“Right,” Linn says, tucking the remote between her knees. “I get that.”

Clearing his throat, William says, “People hear rumors about me before they meet me. So they don’t bother getting to know me. They assume they already know me. And there’s comfort in rumors, so they don’t want the real me to fuck up their lies.”

Smarting, Linn’s cheeks darken. “Guilty. Noora’s friends told me things.”

Snorting back a laugh, William shuts his eyes, as though silencing his thoughts.

“Noora systematically shut down the rumor brigade by fucking befriending me,” he says, the words heavy in his chest. “She cared about them, but not enough to make them stop her.”

Linn thinks on the early days of their friendship: Noora respecting her privacy, gently supporting her from a comfortable distance. Instead of throwing herself into caring for Linn, she’d waited for the right opportunity to allow Linn the privilege of giving back the best way she knew how.

“Noora’s a good friend,” she says, the words electrifying a current in her chest, floodlights of an overwhelming gratitude.

“Yep.” Trembling through a sigh, William arches his head back towards the ceiling. “No one fucks with that gift. Not without fucking with me.”

“Oh my god, William!” a familiar voice says. “Stop scaring her.”

A change, at once subtle and terribly palpable, tenses through William’s body as he pivots over the sofa, daring Noora to stare elsewhere.

“He’s not scaring me,” Linn says, leaning across the sofa to grab the heavy grey blanket.

Biting back a smile, Noora raises a hopeful eyebrow, nudging the heavy grocery bags in her hands towards the sofa’s inhabitants. In one panther-like motion, William swoops over the leg of the sofa, stopping to burn a kiss into the hollow of Noora’s ear before looping both bags through his fingers. 

“I’m cooking for you tonight,” he says, situating the groceries onto the scrubbed kitchen counter. 

Noora’s eyebrow remains firmly raised. “ _ That’s  _ scary.”

Laughing softly, Linn remembers stories told by a delirious, half-asleep Noora: recipes halfway done, undercooked meat, crucial flavors substituted for adventurous improvisations.

“I’ll help you,” she says. Rolling up the sleeves of her oversized woollen sweater, she sorts through the ingredients lodged in the heavier bag, ignoring William’s rapidly growing smile.

Noora’s mouth drops open. “Oh my god.” Folding her arms against her silken white blouse, she studies the mindblowing tableau of her boyfriend and reclusive roommate busying themselves over a domestic task in tandem.

William sniffs. “What?” Rather than committing every nuance of Noora’s shifting expressions to memory, something Linn senses he might do until he dies, he focuses on compiling the ingredients needed for a comforting winter stew.

Tutting, Noora shakes her head. “Go on, then. I’m in my room if you need me.”

They continue assembling the ingredients into disorderly rows, William placing the proper pot on the stove for the broth and meat. In short order, he’s memorized where to find the cooking supplies: the spice rack, the special ingredients Noora uses for her favorite meals. But in thoughtful pauses during his work, lingering teeth gnawing on his bottom lip, hands curling around the counter as though seeking a treasured hold on something, Linn recognizes his silently loud pleas to take back what he said.

“Dinner’s on me tonight,” she says, smirking. “You owe me.”

Immediately, his entire demeanor radiates with a restlessness to exist anywhere but in this kitchen, away from his person. He smiles. The genuine knockout of it suckerpunches Linn straight through the heart.

“Tomorrow.” He mimes the Call Me sign with his free hand, raising his black hood over his head. 

“Okay.” Nodding, Linn watches him round the corner, nodding once more to herself when she hears Noora’s bedroom door close.

_ I still haven’t decided whether he’s good enough for you, Noora. This love you have, it’s too big for both of you, and I think it’s gonna become something else if you’re not careful. But you’re strong enough to love someone who loves you more than he loves himself. Or are you? _

_ I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right here. _


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noora’s POV.

It starts going downhill when Even calls her.   
  
They’d gotten into the habit of calling each other almost daily the past year. When life had gotten more hectic, they’d kept up weekly calls, not having much time to see one another with moving and all that brought with it.    
  
He hasn’t called her the whole time she’s been in the UK. She doesn’t remember even confirming with him that she and William had moved. So much for considering him one of her best friends. He should know that hasn’t changed on her end.   
  
She throws herself into the overly comfortable black chair in the sitting room that drowns her, screening the call. “Hey, boo,” she says. “I’ve missed you.”   
  
His voice gushes. “Don’t fucking get me started on how much I miss you.”   
  
“How goes the new project?”   
  
There’s a dangerous pause. Oh no. Even’s periods of no productivity, no active investment in art, help in doing things like persuading her not eating for a couple of days won’t fuck with her. Or that not sleeping isn’t that bad for you.   
  
He says, sounding breathtakingly assured of himself, “I’m finally doing something about Isak.”   
  
“Oh. Wow.”   
  
“Yeah.” His breath hinges on a delicious laugh. “But I need your help.”   
  
Noora imagines him sitting on his bed, in he and Isak’s chaotically warm apartment, suffused with homegrown devotion, ever involving and so alive your fingers might touch it.    
  
She thinks over how turned off she was by complete strangers coming up to Isak in the hallway not long after he came out, acknowledging a sacred happening in his life that mattered to them in a very different, wholly fabricated way than it mattered to him.    
  
Or to Even, who’d met them head-on with a kindness that gutted Noora in its completeness and would’ve contaminated her with guilt, had she been as ignorant as those girls.   
  
She counts herself lucky as one of Even’s few close friends, someone who knows the boy that dwells in a home years in the creating, a home overcrowded with fluid ideas, colorful pins, effervescent smiles. Someone past the questioning smile, the kindly wary eyes, the halting laugh.    
  
“I need you to talk about love,” he’s saying. “A recording about how it’s an active presence in your life. What it means to you, not to people now as a whole. I recorded my own example of what I want, and it’s essentially me talking about how loving someone with a mental illness ages you. How I’m always thinking about how it exhausts you, helping someone learn to love what you love about them.”   
  
“Yeah, because loving you must fucking suck, Even.”   
  
His laughter conjures up a stream of birds in flight through a cathedral, something holy in a holy place.    
  
“I’m not good at heart, Noora.”   
  
Her brain reroutes to talking with William for hours on her bed about philosophy, what old white men thought about the fundamental ethics of good and evil, how William’s concept of overall morality cursed her to reevaluate her entire conception of him, of their relationship, for the billionth time.   
  
Her heart pangs. They haven’t talked like that in months.   
  
“No one’s all good or all bad, boo,” she says, and there’s no point in hiding the heaviness in her voice.    
  
“God, I  _ miss  _ you. Are you okay?”   
  
If she says yes, he’ll say okay, but she envisions his eyebrows piecing out their infectious dance. Not entirely trusting her with the truth. If she says no, she might cry, and what if William walked in.    
  
Either way, she’s lying because she hasn’t acted on the impulses twitching on and off like erratic fuses in her head.    
  
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she says, and before the tears break through her trembling throat, the door opens.   
  
Clicking off the phone, her stomach whirling with a nauseating force, Noora slides it across the glass coffee table, wondering how the stinging kohl must rim her reddened eyes.   
  
“I can’t do this anymore, William,” she says. “I can’t wait for you to come home like some 1950’s housewife. I can’t fall asleep with you because we’re so messed up by our own heads that we can’t even hold a conversation about something other than us not talking.”   
  
He rips his brushed leather satchel off the dark expanse of his arm, swathed in a cropped black coat, and chucks it at the glass bookcase across the living room. Folding his dark flick of hair out of his eyes, swimming as they are in a storming oblivion of inhibitions, his mouth quirks in a chilling approximation of a smile.    
  
“I fucking quit, Noora.”   
  
His eyes roll with the oncoming threat of a natural disaster. Noora crushes him against her.    


**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the LLF Comment Project (including the LLF Comment Builder), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates responses, including:  
Short comments  
Long comments  
Questions  
“<3” as extra kudos  
Reader-reader interaction  
This author replies to comments.


End file.
